A Customer-Driven Approach to One-of-a-Kind Product Design

This research addresses the issues to identify the optimal product design based on individual customer requirements in one-of-a-kind production (OKP). In this work, a function decomposition approach is introduced for modeling the variations of design functions, configurations, and parameters in generic OKP product families. Requirements of individual customers are modeled at two different levels: function level and technical level. Customized OKP products are created from the generic OKP product families based on customer requirements. The optimal product design is identified from feasible design candidates through optimization. An industrial case study is given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the introduced approach.